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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

Why should users have to pay extra??

The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$.

The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity?

There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.

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If you're on Windows and you want an editor that loads fast, you can just type mspaint.exe. Oh, it doesn't do everything you need? Yeah, guess what, those extra features take time to load.

Right, because all software is equal in complexity therefore they should all share the same requirement in resource loading and time?

Someone has to pay. Whether it's a higher price for users, less time spent on other features, or lower profits for the company, the effort has to come from somewhere.

I don't disagree that responsiveness and user experience are important, but Basecamp is a webapp. Responsiveness for the most common tasks is a higher priority than the one-time cost at start-up.

I'm not sure anyone is "throwing away their userbase"... How many people stop using Photoshop because it takes too long to start? Now, Acrobat Reader on the other hand...

I don't understand why everyone thinks the fact Basecamp is a webapp is important.

As you say, responsiveness and user experience are important, and 37 Signals decided it was worth investing a significant amount in. Adobe have decided, over the years, that it is not.

Because comparing app loading time to website page load times is meaningless.

A better comparison are common tasks in Photoshop, like selection, fill, layer operations, filters, etc. - things that are done constantly while using the application. I don't have any point of reference, but they feel pretty responsive to me. If the article was making a case that Adobe has been neglecting optimization for common operations, then bringing up Basecamp or other webapps would be relevant.

I'm not sure how to explain it more clearly than that.

Every Photoshop equivalent program I've ever used (with the same level of functionality) takes at least the same amount of time to load. I'm pretty sure GIMP actually takes longer.

Basecamp is a bit different, since the application itself is running mostly server-side so it is essentially already loaded. It's possible that the startup/init time of the actual RoR application on a server may take considerably longer.

With web applications the key to speed is more about writing efficient JS, having a good caching strategy and ensuring your server can handle many concurrent requests. A lot of these can be solved by the developers simply throwing more money at their server tech, when it comes to client-only applications you can't realistically buy all of your users new computers.

Is waiting 5-10 seconds honestly "cutting into their productivity"? Even so, there's nothing else that could be done with their time while they wait beyond impotently staring and swearing at their computer?

If that's how they operate then quite frankly they deserve to have "lost" that time.

The program that I use which takes the longest to load is eclipse , that takes around 10 seconds to load.

All I do when I switch my computer on in the morning is load up my mail client which opens pretty much instantly and then click the eclipse icon. By the time I've glanced at my mail to see if there's anything urgent that needs my immediate attention eclipse has already loaded.

I would say I lose exponentially more time to interruptions and distractions than I do waiting for my computer to load anything.

The only time my computer takes a really long time to do anything is when I have to copy down a large dataset from production to my workstation to debug some weird issue. This is going to take 10 minutes anyway so I just use the time to make coffee or something.

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